"SURRENDER: More Than A Definition"
By: Zach Wood
Joel 2:12-13
"Even now," declares the Lord, "return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning." Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity.


Surrender is: To give up or give back; To give up or abandon; To give over or resign to something, as to an emotion.(Dictionary.com)

By reading these definitions, it would probably seem easy to understand we are to give up everything to the Lord. Yeah, we know we need to turn it all over to Him because He's fully capable of any problem or burden we could possibly offer up. However, it's the "offering up" we end up struggling the most with.

You see, in our minds, we know quite a lot. We may even know quite a bit about the whole Bible and what God says to do. But, unless we actually initiate a response and make a step toward fully giving ourselves to the Lord, nothing is going to happen. Or, if anything does happen, it won't be much. And, you may ask, "Why?" Simply because we have allowed the definition of "Surrender" to be words taken from a source and placed into a rarely-transferable bin in our minds. If the definition stays in our minds and never makes its way down to our heart, we can't possibly expect a change to occur.

We often hear the phrase, "Giving it over to the Lord daily". I agree with that, yet, would like to take that a step further. How? We can break "daily" up into hours of the day, even minutes. However, that's not far enough. We can go down to seconds. The Lord tells us to surrender everything to Him each day of our lives. The implication should not remain as once a day to us. We should be breaking that down into surrender every second.

Brothers and Sisters in our Lord Jesus Christ, we are to totally surrender each second of each day to the Lord. We can't possibly look at the definition and think that will motivate us to make a change in giving everything over to the Lord! The words we read and think about must make way to the heart, and then some change needs to occur. Yes, difficult quickly springs to mind. God never told us life would be easy, and we can all easily testify to that.

Surrender is a constant and consistent, day by day, second by second submission returning to the Lord and giving Him all that is in our hearts. If we are burdened down with the worries and concerns of what we have no control over, we cannot enjoy the life God has laid out for us.